Daryn Lehoux

On his book Creatures Born of Mud and Slime: The Wonder and Complexity of Spontaneous Generation

Cover Interview of November 12, 2017

In a nutshell

The planet we live on is positively crawling
with life. There is not a nook or a cranny, it sometimes seems, where we don’t
find some odd species of worm, some crawling slime or microscopic organism.
Again and again, we drill or submerse or dig and we find new kinds of life,
farther down than we thought possible, colder than we thought possible, hotter,
more acidic, weirder.

Every one of those plants and animals and
prokaryotes and whatnot—every single one of them—came into existence from
another of their kind. Some reproduce sexually, some by budding, some by
division, but all from a parent organism more or less identical to them. As we
run backwards in geological time, however, this great chain of living things
must have had some first beginning, some origin, that did not involve a parent
of the same—or indeed of any—species. Living things, now, may all come from
parents of one sort or another, but life itself had, once upon a time,
an absolute beginning. Matter that was utterly nonliving somehow turned into matter
that was now living. Perhaps just once or at any rate not often, but one
time at a minimum, somewhere and somewhen in the cosmos, a living thing must
have just come into existence. Pop.

But this is a very new way of thinking.
From antiquity to the Middle Ages, from Aristotle on past Vesalius, Galileo, Newton,
and after even Darwin, it appeared that this kind of thing, life from non-life,
happened all the time. Maggots, famously, but also eels, bees, mice and
sometimes even people—think about that—just sprang into existence from
putrefying, dead matter. True, the list of organisms took some hits over time,
eventually whittling down to just microorganisms or a few parasites like liver
flukes, but the idea that life could come from non-life, regularly and
routinely, was a remarkably hard one for us to shake.

Why is that?

This book argues that one of the main
reasons is that the evidence for spontaneous generation is, when you look hard at it, really quite good. There is a reason spontaneous generation
was a fact for so long: it stands up to testing—and very, very good
testing—remarkably well.

By diving in to the debates around
spontaneous generation as they unfolded historically, this book raises some
important philosophical questions about what it means to do science, to understand
nature. From its earliest articulation in Aristotle, all the way to the end of
its plausibility as a fact about the world, we find that the problems posed by
spontaneous generation provoked some very good, very hard thinking about what
life was and how it could possibly come to be from nonliving matter. This is no
easy problem, in fact. This story is emphatically not one of primitive thinkers
failing to see the simple evidence, the easy tests (just cover the vials! Just
boil the solutions!), right before their eyes. Not at all. Instead what we find
is a long series of remarkably intelligent approaches to the evidence for spontaneous
generation, struggling to figure out which animals might come to be in
this way, and even more importantly: How?

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011